Turkey's celebrated postmodernist continues the exploration of identity begun in The White Castle (1991) in this often claustrophobic, byzantine mystery appropriately set in the author's native Istanbul. The city, like the story itself, is haunted by the past, a history that includes the Islamic conquest, the long dying of the Ottoman empire, the modernization implemented by Ataturk, and recent regimes threatened by Marxist and military plots. As snow begins to fall, Galip, a young lawyer, comes home to find that his wife, Ruya, a first cousin with whom he grew up in the old apartment block their family once owned, has disappeared, leaving him a 19-word farewell note written in green ink. Telling their family that Ruya is ill, Galip embarks upon a search for her that becomes both a realistic and metaphysical process of detection as he meticulously pursues even the slenderest clues. Convinced that Ruya is hiding out with her half-brother Jelal, a famous newspaper columnist who has also disappeared, Galip starts reading Jelal's old columns in search of clues. These erudite and idiosyncratic columns — everything from examinations of Islamic mysticism to musings on the day when extensive pollution will cause the Bosphorus to dry up — alternate with the chapters recording the ongoing investigation. Galip, long jealous of Jelal, assumes the columnist's identity by moving into one of his many hideouts, wearing his clothes, impersonating him on the phone, and even writing his columns. Like Jelal, Galip is also obsessed with the nature of identity, with reading secrets from people's faces, and with the possibility "of being both someone else and also myself." But this intense and often merely philosophical search ends abruptly in tragedy, and Galip is left writing stories like Jelal; for writing is the "sole consolation." Shades of Calvino with a Turkish twist. And with as many layers as a piece of baklava.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-11394-7
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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